THE HANDY VOLUME "WAVERLEY.”

KENILWORTH.

BY

SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART.

LONDON: BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO.

THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

604014

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS. 1805

LONDON:

BRADBURY, NEW, & CO., PRINTERS,

WHITEFRIARS.

KENILWORTH.

CHAP. I.

I am an innkeeper, and know my grounds,
And study them; Brain o' man, I study them.
I must have jovial guests to drive my ploughs,
And whistling boys to bring my harvests home,
Or I shall hear no flails thwack--THE NEW INN.

T is the privilege of tale-tellers to open their
story in an inn, the free rendezvous of all

travellers, and where the humour of each displays itself, without ceremony or restraint. This is especially suitable when the Scere is laid during the old days of merry England, when the guests were in some sort not merely the inmates, blt the messmates and temporary companions of mine host, who was usahlly a personage of privileged freedom, comely presence. and good humour. Patronised by him, the characters of the company were placed in ready contrast; and they seldom failed, during the emptying of a six-hooped pot, to throw off reserve, and present themselves to each other, and to their landlord, with the freedom of old acquaintance.

The village of Cumnor, within three or four miles of Oxford, boasted, during the eighteenth year of Queen Elizabeth, an excellent inn of the old stamp, conducted, or rather ruled, by Giles Gosling, a man of a goodly person, and of somewhat round belly; fifty years of age and upwards, moderate in his reckonings, prompt in his